“[Romney] will allow the wind credit to expire, end the stimulus boondoggles and create a level playing field on which all sources of energy can compete on their merits.”

– Romney campaign spokesman, “Wind Energy Tax Credit Splits Obama, Romney,” Des Moines Register, July 30, 2012.

The extension of the 20-year old Production Tax Credit (PTC) for windpower and other qualifying renewable energy is a wedge issue in the national political campaign. And with growing state-level pushback against government subsidies for qualifying renewables, it is time to ‘put-up-or-shut-up’ for on-grid wind and solar technologies.

And it was VERY good news that the Romney campaign issued a statement two days ago officially opposing an extension of the wind PTC. The other side wants him to walk it back, but few tangibles epitomize the fluff and failure of government-knows-best than taxpayer investments in wind power and solar power

AWEA: In Panic Mode

Meanwhile, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) has pumped millions of dollars into a lobbying campaign to secure the PTC’s extension.…

“We will take the vision for affordable energy, common sense regulation, and safe technology to the American people; then return to Washington D.C. to deliver the message — it’s time to free the American people from costly, unnecessary regulations and bureaucracy. It’s time for Washington to untie the hands of American energy producers and manufacturers, and free these job creators to put our country back to work again.”

Freedom rings! The anti-energy eco-planners used to monopolize the not-for-profit energy dialogue. There was yours truly running the Institute for Energy Research (IER) out of my house, and Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute carrying the free-market energy torch in Washington, D.C. And then that feisty bunch at the Competitive Enterprise Institute–Marlo Lewis and Chris Horner, et al.–came on the scene.

But now our side has caught up.…

[Ed. note: Milton Friedman’s views are also explored in Part I of this series (worldview) and in Part III (political capitalism).]

“Economists may not know much. But we know one thing very well: how to produce surpluses and shortages. Do you want a surplus? Have the government legislate a minimum price that is above the price that would otherwise prevail…. Do you want a shortage? Have the government legislate a maximum price that is below the price that would otherwise prevail.”

– Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), pp. 219.

“It is a mark of how far we have gone on the road to serfdom that government allocation and rationing of oil is the automatic response to the oil crisis.”

– Milton Friedman, “Why Some Prices Should Rise,” Newsweek, November 19, 1973.

Special political favor at the local, state, and federal levels have created an artificial industry: industrial windpower. Massive turbines have resulted in negative ecological and economic effects. Rural towns and countryside across the USA have become the dumping grounds for massive infrastructure producing a paltry amount of remote, unreliable energy.

For many enjoying rural life, in particular, an invasion by industrial wind installations has turned environmentalism on its head.

New York State has more than its share of such malinvestment and damage. State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli recently reported that tax exemptions by NYS’s Industrial Development Agencies (IDAs) were not creating jobs and “shifting tax burdens” from mega-corporations to local residents.

As a result, we have the spectacle in Upstate New York of taxpayer-subsidized industrial wind installations driving people from their homes — while further endangering the populations of eagles, hawks, herons, cranes, bats, and all magnificent flying creatures.…